There comes a time, when it’s okay to write about your parents. For me, it might as well be today. The truth about my father, has been coming in short sentences, one word lines, and other hints for years. Now I will attempt to “bare all” for the conspiracy tabloids just in case the “truth” remains hidden in a Templar cave somewhere. Here it is:

I have no idea who killed JFK. I don’t know who was on the grassy knoll, and I don’t know if Oswald was one of the three stooges. I do know, from general knowledge, that Marilyn Monroe was a woman of rather loose association and that she had suffered from depression and “poor judgement”. What else can I say?

I don’t know if UFO’s are extra-terrestrial. I suspect, through my limited theological reading, that they are deceptions of the Evil One, but I have no proof of their existence and I have searched my father’s dresser extensively and come up with zip.

I do not know if the CIA actually found any success in the MK Ultra (mind control) program. But if they had, I wouldn’t have ended up this way. At all.

Outside of badly phrased humour, I do not know how to describe my father. So I will stick to what I do know:

He was born in 1933 and was raised during the Great Depression. In 1955, he enlisted in the American Army. In 1958 he was recruited by the CIA to attend the newly formed Russian Language School at Monterey, California. Within a year, he was an “operative” behind the Iron Curtain and active in the “eastern bloc” recruiting double agents and “running agents” throughout the Soviet state and satellite countries.

In 1961, he reattended the Russian Language school, to further refine his language skills and studied Russian with Gleb Podmoshansky who later became Fr. Herman of the Platina “Brotherhood” fame. Under Gleb’s tutoring, he mastered “fine” Russian and was able to pass as a privileged “Party member”. By 1965, he had moved his base of operations to Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) and was busy infiltrating the GRU. In between GRU and KGB meetings, he had time to father my brother who was (thankfully for the UN red-tape department) born in “West” Germany.

I was born in the States, in 1966, and my father immediately took off for parts unknown until three months later, when he contacted my mother to let her know that she should pack up the apartment because they were moving to Bucharesti, Romania. In Romania, my “nanny”, a KGB agent hired through the American Embassy was assigned to me, and she promptly took me to the “Black Cathedral” in Bucharesti, to have me bless by an Orthodox priest. After all, my parents were godless, American heretics and I was defenseless.

Actually, my mother was a God-fearing, Bible-Thumping Lutheran, but that didn’t matter to the local GRU/KGB. it was very important that my mother be allowed to access the Church in Romania. As a result, she was able to meet with a local priest, and some of the local surviving monks in the Suceava region. At all costs, this crazy American lady with her wierd ideas about the American Bible, must be allowed to report back to the west, that “religion” was “encouraged” by the Iron Curtain.

When the Priest came to bless the family of a suicide, my mother was there to greet him, and she , as expected, reported back to all her American friends, that Orthodox people were indeed compassionate. Likewise, when the abbot of a Suceava monastery was suspended from his post, my mother in her Lutheran wisdom, saw through to the heart of the matter, and reported back to her American friends that he wasn’t really a priest, as originally thought, but was ejected by the Church. And, also, when my nanny’s mother “died” and the local priest in Timisoara said she was murdered by the Securitate, my mother believed him, and reported that back also.

It was all a avery complicated business growing up in my house. My brother and I were never certain if we would have rooms to come home to, after school, or if we would be “escorted by helicopter” out of any given country.

There are so many memories, and so many stories, I cannot tell them all here. But I was thinking the other day: At what point does a person realize they are Orthodox?

We are taught , in the Church, that a person becomes a Christian at their Orthodox baptism, or chrismation, and this is very true, both literally and theologically.

But it is also true, that we begin our journey toward Orthodoxy before we are even born; before we take our first breath. The sum total of our life, the experiences we have had, the things we have suffered, all serve to bring us, eventually, and however it happens, to the One Holy, Catholic, Apostolic Church.

My father, an atheist, made sure, through his work and his life, my own salvation. May the Lord have mercy upon him!

“Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his loved ones.”

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